1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing technique for searching for an image containing a predetermined object.
2. Description of the Related Art
An application is known that is capable of analyzing the feature information, such as a person's face, of an object contained in an image and adding the analysis result as the person name to the image. The image to which the person name has been added can be used as one of the images to be searched, when searching for an image containing an object specified by a person name. Here, in the case of searching for who the person contained in an image is, there is a method of efficiently performing the search using other information, in addition to the feature information such as the person's face.
For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-260483 discloses, when a person in a shot image is being searched for, using a database in which attribute area information corresponding to the address is registered in addition to the feature information of the person's face, preferentially searching for people with attribute area information that matches the shooting location information of the shot image.
Digital cameras can shoot a large number of images, and therefore numerous images may be retained in an application, in some cases. Further, since it is common to save only shot images in such a digital camera, setting additional information for searching images, as done in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-260483, is troublesome for the user. On the other hand, in the case of searching for a specific person only by using shot images, it takes time to conduct the search because the face feature information is required to be analyzed as many times as the number of images to be searched.